Lightroom Tip – Reordering Presets

If you haven’t noticed, you get fairly limited options when ordering your presets in the Preset panel in Lightroom. By default they’re sorted alphabetically. So any preset that begins with the letter A will show up in front of all other presets. Well, if you’re like me (and let’s hope you’re not ), you probably have a lot of presets so you have to scroll in your presets panel. So what happens if one of your favorite presets begins with the letter S? Do you scroll down to get to it each time? There is a workaround. It’s not exactly pretty but it’ll get the job done. Just rename the preset and put a number in front of it. Right-click on the actual preset’s name in the Preset panel and choose Rename. Then put a 1 in front of it and it’ll show up at the top of that preset folder. If you put a 1 in front of multiple presets then they’ll be sorted alphabetically after that. Then put a 2 in front of the preset you want to show up next and so on. Like I said, it ain’t pretty but it’s definitely better than always scrolling through to look for your favorite preset.

I hope that helps a little. Have a great Friday and enjoy your weekend!

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

7 Comments

I’ve been using this naming convention for a while now to organize preset folders. Works great since I can put my most-used ones (lens corrections, white balance, sharpening, black and white) at the top of the stack.

How do you achieve it?
I tried creating the corresponding folders in Windows Explorer but Lightroom is not showing the actual folder structure, which would be something like this:
Usual presets
Lens correction
Lens A
Lens B
LEns C

Hi Mike,
You better put 01 in front of the original preset name. Just putting 1 means that – having more than 9 presets – the number 10 will come after number 1, which is not a logical sequence. With 01, 02 …. 09, 10 you get the correct sequence in a bunch of 99 presets.
Best regards,
Henk

Hey Matt, thanks for that tip on organizing presets. I found a very unusual thing with the presets. The story goes like this; I, for some reason, had set the “store presets with catalog” in the settings menu for my presets. Over the months I would add or edit presets and save them. Then I read that I probably shouldn’t bother with that setting and turned it off. Then! I couldn’t find my Presets, where’d they go?
I found them eventually by ‘show in explorer’ and looking in the catalog folders. But here is the tip! What I found was that if I switched that setting on/off while in the Develop module, the list of presets on the left panel would change immediately. From the presets that came with LR to the presets that I had added from before.
Not sure if this is a tip really, but it did cause some confusion until I figured out what was happening. Now I can go on and organize my presets, and it appears that I just have to move files around in Explorer to get it the way I like, then restart LR. cheers, Mike

Is it likewise possible to re-order the list of available folders in LR maintained by yyyy/mm/dd, (each year a new list) so that newest folder is at the top of the list?
Now it’s the opposite, always the need to scroll down a long year-long list of file folders. Petty stuff… but aggravating.